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I submitted my first piece of writing when I was seventeen, a story about my first job, working at the employee cafeteria at General Telephone where my mother was a dispatcher. Rolling the 20# white bond backed by a sheet of thin blue carbon paper into my Smith Corona, I typed it out slowly, carefully, on a piece of erasable paper—and mailed it off to Cosmopolitan along with a cover letter. Not just to any editor at Cosmo, by the way, I sent it directly to Helen Gurley Brown.

The piece itself, meant to be comical, was full of clumsy attempts at self-effacing humor. I strived for a similar tone in the cover letter I addressed to Brown, completely clueless that the high powered editor in chief wasn’t the one reading unsolicited manuscripts. After I signed off I added the following PS. I could have said I was Joyce Carol Oates. What I thought that would accomplish I can’t imagine. That an unsatisfactory submission would get published because of a lame joke?

Above Ground on the London Underground—Day 39: 5 Bloomsbury Book Shops

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If it's Friday we must be back in London.Every Friday I take a virtual walking tour ‘above ground’ on the London Underground. Using my Tube guide & my fitbit® device, my goal is to walk 10,000 steps a day roughly following along the Underground route, reporting back here on Fridays with my findings. Here are the previous days. This week I'm following the Piccadilly Line. This is Day 39.I'm sorry. What else can I say? I took off on an impromptu road trip with my hubby last week, abandoning my weekly London walk on Friday, ditching my commitment to Joy's British Isles Friday meme, and leaving you, gentle reader, in the lurch. Well, not in the lurch exactly, more like the environs of Bloomsbury where I was supposedly off in search of a bookstore to buy a novel by Virginia Woolf. In reality, I was off with my hubby on a trip up the coast of California and I forgot to pack a book altogether! Instead of reading in the evening in our motel room, I spent a lot of time going through my Instagram photos and playing brain games on Lumosity —keeping my fingers crossed that a brain game a day keeps the Alzheimers away.So today it's back to Bloomsbury and my quest to find a good bookstore or two. From the Museum Tavern—where I killed a pint (just one, I'm a lightweight) it's a mini-stroll over to the home of the acclaimed literary journal the London Review of Books which is more than just a publishing house...it's a bookstore AND even better, a bookstore with a cake shop! Like the best book stores, the LRB hosts frequent writerly events—looking through their calendar the eclectic evenings range from the uber intellectual to the delicious—

What have the French ever done for us? (Gastronomically speaking) in which food critic and writer Dino Joannides chairs an evening of debate and dining.

Food will be provided by award-winning greengrocer Andreas of Chelsea, with charcuterie from The Ham & Cheese Company and cheese from Beillevaire; wine will be provided by Aubert & Mascoli.

The events typically sell out quickly but the London Book Review posts past events online so that anyone can can check them out. As a 'memoirist'—although that is too high fallutin' sounding for my scribbles—I'm intrigued by the Alchemy event coming up on August 31:

Alchemy: The competing claims of fiction and reality have provided, of late, one of the most heated and productive literary debates. Where do the boundaries between them lie? And who has the right, the ability, even the desire, to draw them?

Besides tea and lunch, the cake shop boasts beautiful creations that you can order for your own special event, just like a real bakery.

In the opposite direction is Arthur Probsthain'son Great Russell Street, a bookseller specializing in books from and about Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Not quite your cup of tea? They've got tea too, at their own little Tea & Tattle Cafe.

You'll find books on Marxist Theory, British History, the Black Struggle, LGBT and even childrens books for your budding socialists. What you won't find is a tea room.

BookMarks

Foylesat 107 Charing Cross Road is the flagship of the Foyles chain of bookstores. More Barnes and Noble than your local indie bookstore (if you're lucky enough to have an indie bookstore in your town). But as Meg Ryan learned in You've Got Mail, that doesn't necessarily make it a bad thing; there are author events, storybook times for the kiddies, signed copies of best sellers and, yep, a cafe. The bookstore is hosting the prestigious sci fi book award, the Arthur C. Clarke award, this August.

Before we head off to St. Pancras, the next stop on the Picadilly line, we'll end our tour of Bloomsbury area bookshops with a visit to Gay's the Word which is, according to Wikipedia, the only specifically gay & lesbian bookstore in the U.K.

As you might expect, the store is not just about the books; right from the start Gay's the Word has been a information and resource center for the gay and lesbian community. Named after a musical of the same name, Gay's the Word has been in business since 1979 when gay themed books weren't readily available at all bookstores in the UK. Most of their stock had to be imported from the U.S. It hasn't always been easy. In 1984 the shop was raided by Customs who, labeling the bookstore a porn store, confiscated thousands of pounds of literature including work by Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, and Christopher Isherwood. Thank goodness, times have changed. I wish my uncle, who lived his entire life as a closeted gay man in the suburbs of England, was still around to see the brave new world.

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I submitted my first piece of writing when I was seventeen, a story about my first job, working at the employee cafeteria at General Telephone where my mother was a dispatcher. Rolling the 20# white bond backed by a sheet of thin blue carbon paper into my Smith Corona, I typed it out slowly, carefully, on a piece of erasable paper—and mailed it off to Cosmopolitan along with a cover letter. Not just to any editor at Cosmo, by the way, I sent it directly to Helen Gurley Brown.

The piece itself, meant to be comical, was full of clumsy attempts at self-effacing humor. I strived for a similar tone in the cover letter I addressed to Brown, completely clueless that the high powered editor in chief wasn’t the one reading unsolicited manuscripts. After I signed off I added the following PS. I could have said I was Joyce Carol Oates. What I thought that would accomplish I can’t imagine. That an unsatisfactory submission would get published because of a lame joke?

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